


Black Work

by osprey_archer



Series: Bolsheviks [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Community: hc_bingo, Gen, It's Not Paranoia If They're Really Out To Get You, Mad Scientists, Medical Experimentation, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Paranoia, Recruitment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-30
Updated: 2016-06-30
Packaged: 2018-07-19 05:41:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7347415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/osprey_archer/pseuds/osprey_archer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You don't develop a fully functioning metal limb on the first try. The Soldier is only the latest and most successful of a long line of failed experiments. Grigorii Mikhailovich decides to recruit him before the lab pushes this success into failure, too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Black Work

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to littlerhymes and lucymonster for betaing this!

“How is he, Yegor Kirilovitch?” 

“Wonderful, wonderful!” Yegor Kirilovitch cries. It’s late, but he still wears his lab coat. Grisha thinks it likely that he sleeps in his lab like a bat. It is probably more comfortable than his communal apartment. “The graft continues to hold. I have been thinking – ” Yegor Kirilovitch rises up on his toes. The thought delights him. “We should remove a leg and attach a metal replacement there, too.”

Grisha is displeased, but not surprised. He has long suspected that Yegor’s final dream is to replace a man piece by piece with metal. Yegor will be most surprised when he puts in a metal brain and discovers that his metal man no longer works. “Hold off,” Grisha says.

“Think what we might learn, Grigorii Mikhailovich! We might discover how to make other soldiers accept their grafts, too!” 

Grisha doubts it. Not with Yegor Kirilovitch at the helm. “I brought him to you,” Grisha reminds Yegor. “Do nothing for the present.” 

The lab is in the heart of the building. As Grisha heads toward the ward, he begins to hear the dull thud of the victory fireworks outside. 

Sometimes when he visits the soldier, Grisha brings along a richly illustrated book of fairytales that he used to read to his own Kolya. He does not want the soldier’s Russian vocabulary limited to hospital words, and the book is full of bears and stove and samovars. But today he carries nothing but _Pravda_ , with its banner headlines extolling Victory in Berlin. The Soldier will want to hear that. He loves reports of battles, of daring exploits by Soviet aviators – Stalin’s Falcons, as they are called – of Stalin himself. He listens with moist eyes to sentimental poems extolling Soviet motherhood. He is bored stiff by agricultural statistics. 

Despite the late hour, the ward is abuzz when Grisha arrives: the victory fireworks have kept them all up. Even the petrified men still awaiting their grafts are smiling. They know, they can see from the others, that their bodies will reject Yegor Kirilovitch’s metal limbs, that they will lie pale and sick and sweaty as they wait for the surgery to be reversed, and if they are unlucky – if Yegor is throwing one of his periodic temper tantrums at the limitations of the human body, which will not meld smoothly with his beautiful machines – they may die before the graft is removed. Only one graft has taken so far: the American soldier’s.

Grisha checks himself. It is dangerous even to think of the man in those terms. What if Stalin finds out? An American soldier in a top secret Soviet lab. Doubtless a spy, and everyone who harbored him a spy as well, and the gulag for them all. Grisha should have shot him in the head and left him on the mountainside with a stake in his heart. Safer for everyone.

The soldier’s bed is empty.

Grisha stops, his heart a stone in his chest. Has SMERSH taken him? Did Yegor Kirilovitch already wheel him off to surgery? Unlike Yegor not to say so. 

“He’s at the window,” the soldier lying in the next bed says. He is pallid with limb rejection, shifting in his discomfort. Metal feet peek out beneath the blanket. “Lucky stiff.”

But he says it with affection as much as envy. The soldier is the pet of the ward. He can’t talk – Grisha had Yegor Kirilovitch snap his vocal cords during the surgery to attach his arm. No sense in risking him speaking English. But he smiles all the time. Even at the beginning, he laughed when the others laughed, a strange soundless laugh with a big smile and an open mouth. 

The nurses think he is simple. “The mentally defective are often very sweet,” Marusya Petrovna explained to Grisha.

But Grisha knows better. Over the last two months, Grisha has seen the light of understanding kindle in the soldier’s eyes. He listens attentively to his fellow patients, to fairy tales and newspaper reports. He points to pictures of things he does not know and tilts his head at Grisha questioningly, waiting for the word. The mentally defective don’t learn a new language in three months lying on a hospital ward. 

No. The soldier smiles all the time because he is not a Soviet citizen, he has not spent the last twelve years in mortal terror for his life. _American_ , Grisha thinks, and suppresses a shudder. 

Like his arm, the soldier’s smiles ought to be impossible. Yegor Kirilovitch’s chair has killed almost everyone who has gone through it. “What’s wrong with them?” Yegor Kirilovitch once groaned to Grisha, head in his hands. Typical of Yegor to think that problem is the patients and not his machine. “Memory erasure will be the next great step in reeducation! If only they will stop dying!” 

The few who survived are dead-eyed, drooling, just about capable of feeding themselves if a nurse sits by their sides and tells them how. They do not laugh at jokes. 

The soldier sits on the windowsill, the red and blue lights of the fireworks flickering over his face. As Grisha approaches, he turns and smiles, lifting his hands and opening them like starbursts. 

“Fireworks,” Grisha agrees. “Beautiful, aren’t they? A celebration for our arrival in Berlin.”

The soldier nods. He reaches for Grisha’s newspaper, hopeful. The other day, he nipped the book of fairytales right out of Grisha’s hand, flipping to his favorite story and then holding it up to Grisha with the naughty smile of a child who knows he is too beloved to be punished. Grisha read him the tale of Snegurochka, just as he wanted. 

But now Grisha hides the newspaper behind him. “Do you know what this means, soldatik?” he asks.

“ _Pobeda_ ,” the soldier murmurs.

Grisha has twenty years of experience hiding his thoughts behind a pleasant mask. He does not flinch, his face does not so much as flicker when the soldier, impossibly, speaks.

Impossibly? The soldier survived a fall from the railway tracks that should have killed him, survived the chair, has accepted the metal limb graft. It’s no surprise his vocal cords have healed. 

Grisha meant to put this choice off longer, but the soldier’s speech forces his hand. Either he leaves the soldier here and hopes he does not slip into English before Yegor Kirilovitch’s experiments kill him – that Yegor will manage it eventually, Grisha has no doubt – 

“You can talk?” Grisha asks, pleasure in his voice.

The soldier nods. “ _Da_ ,” he whispers. His voice is rough, but it has no trace of an accent. His right hand rises to his throat. “ _U menya bolit gorla._ ”

“Your throat hurts? Then don’t talk just yet,” Grisha says.

Or Grisha can take the soldier with him. Keep him away from people who might hear him speaking English, train him and his metal arm into a weapon for the motherland and communism. 

“Soldat,” Grisha says, and his voice is so grave that the soldier turns away from the fireworks and looks attentively in his face. “You are right. We have won a great victory. The Great Patriotic War is over. But the motherland still needs defenders. Even as they fled before our brave Red Army, the Nazis awakened forces of counterrevolution throughout eastern Europe. And our erstwhile allies, the English – ” It is a struggle to risk the next word, but he must – “and the Americans - now that the Nazi threat is defeated, they will turn their arms on us. We have a little breathing space as they fight the Japanese. But soon, soldatik, they’ll come for us. They cannot stand the spectacle of the working classes living free and happy under communism, when their own working people groan under capitalist tyranny.”

The soldier’s face shines. His eyes reflect the bright sparks of the fireworks.

“Understand, soldat, I can’t offer you this glory,” Grisha says, gesturing out the window at the victory celebration. “There will be no fireworks and no parades for us. It is the black work of the party I am offering you – good work, necessary work, but work that must be done in darkness. We will not be honored for it. We will die in the darkness with it. Even if it does not kill us outright, the things we will do and see will be with us till we die. We will sacrifice ourselves to create our beautiful communist future, a world where children are born free from want and fear, and can grow straight and tall as oak trees in the light.” 

The soldier searches Grisha’s face. Grisha’s eyes are moist; he finds that he is nearly holding his breath. Fireworks fill the sky. “Tvaya rabota?” the soldier asks. _Your work_?

Grisha notes the informal _you_ with chagrin. He will have to teach the soldier better manners. “Our work,” he says. “If you will agree.”

The soldier nods. “Ya c toboy,” he says. _I’m with you_.

It should please Grisha, but he feels instead an intense rush of foreboding. “Don’t say that,” he says lightly. “Speak to me as the Young Pioneers do. Always ready!”

“ _Vsegda gotof_!” the soldier echoes, and raises his hand to his throat, and opens his mouth in his soundless laugh.

“ _Vsedga gotof_ ,” Grisha agrees. “Always ready to serve the motherland. Always ready to further the revolution.” He takes the soldier’s hands in his. The cool metal of the soldier’s left hand is a shock. “Let’s go.”

The soldier tilts his head questioningly. He glances at the other patients, the man with two metal feet lying in the bed next to his. 

“We should go now,” Grisha says. There is no sense in leaving the soldier within reach of Yegor Kirilovitch’s twitchy scalpel. “Take your leave of them. And then we must go. The future calls.” 

The soldier moves to say goodbye. Grisha turns to the window to give him his space. The fireworks have ended. Their smoky ghosts drift away in the dark sky.

**Author's Note:**

> A few historical notes:
> 
> SMERSH was the Soviet Union's wartime counterintelligence agency. The name is an acronym for Smert Shpionam, "Death to Spies." They arrested people for things like writing rude comments about Stalin in their correspondence, having a German name, or having been a POW. Some Soviet soldiers went directly from Nazi POW camps to Soviet gulags. 
> 
> "The black work of the Party" is Stalin's phrase for the work of the secret police: assassinations, arrests, torture, etc.


End file.
